← The Dave Gerhardt Show (from Exit Five)
The Dave Gerhardt Show (from Exit Five)
What B2B Marketers Can Learn from Restaurant Marketing (with Jessica Serrano, CMO at Bagel Brands)
00:53:19
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- [00:03]
Dave Gerhardt
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- [01:36]
Jessica Serrano
1-212-34.
- [01:42]
Dave Gerhardt
Hey. My guest this week is Jessica Serrano. She's the CMO at Bagel Brands, and she spent her entire career in restaurant marketing at places like Taco Bell, Burger King, and Dig In. We got into why consumer and B2B marketing are way more similar than people think. I know that's a topic you all want to talk about. All the B2B marketers want to be consumer marketers and the consumer marketers want to be B2B marketers. This is a perfect topic for you. We talk about how she's using AI across her marketing and sales process and her philosophy, which I love, that her job is to build the brand over time and drive sales overnight. Enjoy my conversation with Jessica Serrano. All right, super excited because my guest is Jessica Serrano. We just met. We met because I posted the lyrics to a neo song on LinkedIn with no context, and it was instantly swallowed up by the AI comments who were like, absolutely, Dave. I am also so sick of love songs. Isn't it so interesting how we don't use answering machines anymore? And I saw you reposted it, which is amazing. So we've been talking riffing about music and life and you're a mom of twin 5 year olds, you, and you're, you're like a awesome CMO at a consumer brand. So what the heck are you doing on my podcast, which is mostly about B2B marketing? Can you say what you said just behind the scenes? Actually.
- [02:58]
Jessica Serrano
Yeah, we're gonna find out together. But ultimately, the reason that you're even in my world is because as a B2C marketer, I. There's a lot that we can learn from B2B marketers.
- [03:08]
Dave Gerhardt
So that's good because we do all this content for B2B marketers and everyone is like, it's almost like athletes want to be rappers, musicians. Musicians and athletes want to, you know, it's a vice versa. So it's like we all want to do the cool stuff like consumer brands, but then here I have the CMO of a 30 year old mega brand in the, in the food space, actually. So before this you were CMO at Dig In. So right now you're CMO at Bagel Brands. We're going to talk a bunch about that. But you were, you were CMO at Digin and something interesting happened because you're CMO at Dig In. All of a sudden Covid happens and tell me about the shift that happened in your. In your business basically overnight.
- [03:45]
Jessica Serrano
Yeah, you're right. I have been in food marketing my entire career. I have only sold food, only my first job. I was a sales rep for Nabisco building cookie and cracker displays in grocery stores. But eventually I found my way into fast food. I worked at Taco Bell and Burger King both during COVID So in qsr, Covid really accelerated our business because you couldn't eat out. So people were going through drive throughs. So that job was trying to figure out, you know, how do we get throughput through a drive through. And when Dig in called in 2022, they were coming out of a very different Covid reality, which was that Dig in, for those of you who don't know, is a fast casual chain in the Northeast. About 30 to 40 locations and very heavily concentrated in Manhattan. It was all office lunch walk in business. And so when Covid hit, the business came to a screeching halt. They almost didn't survive it, but they did. They figured out how to kind of right size things and get onto Third party delivery. And it really transformed what was a brick and mortar business into an E commerce business, whether they wanted to or not. So when the founder called me in 22 and said, you know, help me to figure out how to scale this business for its next chapter of growth. We want to learn from the lessons of COVID The first job was diversifying into other markets. So here was this concept that had product market fit in an urban setting, but did it scale to suburban markets? And so, you know, opening the 20th Manhattan location is different than opening the first one in Virginia. And so that's the journey I went on over those years was opening seven new markets for them, but also realizing that there were things we could learn from B2B, because catering was a big part of the business. So if you think about it, you spend $15 when you walk into a Dig in, but an Office admin spends $500 on catering. And it's also an acquisition tool. What I heard from consumers was that sometimes their first time eating Dig in was a meal that was catered from their office. So that sparked a whole big question for me about, huh, how could I approach this differently than what I would building my traditional walk in business?
- [05:51]
Dave Gerhardt
Yeah, that is so interesting. Right? Because it's like a friend. If it's office lunch, you didn't choose it, but you end up eating and you're like, oh, what was that like? I'm going to go have Dig In, I'm going to go have cava, whatever. We live out in the woods in Vermont right now, and I used to live in the city in Boston, and we've had more everything. Tate Kava dig in all those places, eat them for lunch every day, that I was so sick of them. What I would give to have like a Dig in in my area. Right, right, right now. So people that listen to this podcast love, like, nerding. This is like a safe space to nerd out about the actual marketing of stuff. And so I would love to just dig into that marketing approach. So you basically go up market, go B2B instead of trying to sell one digging bowl for 20 bucks. There's no way. Sorry to like, you know, speak for you, because I'm not in this industry, but there's no way in hell a dick and bowl is $15. Today. I can't even get a PB&J for $15. You can't have real ingredients and be $15 a day. But today, anyway, what changed in the marketing approach you mentioned, like, offline to me, you start thinking about the target buyer is different. HubSpot is different. You use something like HubSpot. What do you actually do to go and acquire these caterers? I'd love to dig in some actually marketing place to go market to these companies to sell the catering piece.
- [07:02]
Jessica Serrano
Well, you mentioned Boston, so that was one of the key opportunities that I saw was Manhattan was rebounding faster than Boston. So I'm like, huh, what is going on in Boston? Did people move out of the city that never came back? I was trying to figure it out. So.
- [07:15]
Dave Gerhardt
And sorry, when you say trying to figure it out, what are you looking at? What numbers are you looking at to figure this stuff out?
- [07:20]
Jessica Serrano
I'm looking at average unit volume, average transaction counts, my loyalty numbers. Trying to understand why is this DMA underperforming the other. And so I ended up hiring a young woman to help me figure out catering. Because to your point, I did the math and I'm like, I can go get hundreds more $20 transactions or I can go and get a few 500. And I really, I need to do both, right? But I knew that I had this kind of like short term sales lever if I could figure out the catering piece. So I hired this gal and said, hey, here's a list of all the laps customers from Boston. I pulled it out of the ordering platform. I'm like, these people used to order catering from us and they don't anymore. Go find out why. And she did. She called them, she emailed them, and she's like, some of these people moved out of the city. Some of their offices closed and are fully remote. But she also found people and said, they introduced me to the new admin or they forgot about us. And she was able to recapture a ton of revenue. So then naturally you go, okay, how do I scale this? So then after showing progress with this one salesperson, I ended up scaling the team to five and having one in each market. And we just hit an inflection point of them going, we can't like keep manually pulling these email lists out of our ordering platform. We need HubSpot. And we had Klaviyo on the consumer side of our business, right? Like we have drip campaigns and journeys and all of that. So. So I was trying to understand, like, hmm, okay, why do we need this different platform? I was not familiar with HubSpot. I never had a reason to use it. And so I also started to realize that all my B2C outreach was kind of interfering with their B2B because the overlap of those customers was real too. And I was trying to use my klaviyo drips to sell catering, but it wasn't right. And so the team was like, we gotta figure this thing out. So then we started figuring out sequencing and buyer Personas, right? So on the B2C side, of course we have consumer targets, right? Like young office professional. That's the dig in primary target. But on the B2B side, there were nuances to the decision makers. There's the office admin whose pain point is I'm just trying to feed a bunch of people that have different allergens and it's on time and it's accurate. But then I also had nutritionists for professional sports team teams that are like, can you get your product through TSA and feed this team on a flight with these calorie guidelines? Right. And then I'd have a university that wants to know if I can do house accounts and POS and tax free constructs. So it became clear to me like if you want to actually do this well, you cannot treat this like traditional restaurant marketing.
- [10:02]
Dave Gerhardt
Yeah, it's so different. I mean that's so relatable to what most of our listeners go through in like a B2B standpoint. It's like you perfectly articulated the complexities of B2B marketing in a way that doesn't sound like B2B marketing. It's the exact same thing. And in this world it's just more like there's procurement, buying committees, security compliance, all these things. You got to figure out how do the Patriots can, you know, is dig in an option for the Patriots on their flight to Buffalo? That's crazy. That's super interesting. And then our world would be like, and then if I might have the office admin, but I might have their Gmail, I need their work, I'm going to behave differently. I don't want to get a catering email to my Gmail. Like hit me with when I'm at work. And there's the message.
- [10:40]
Jessica Serrano
Yeah. So another trick that we ended up figuring out was that we could cross sell our main menu customers. So what started somewhat manually was we would pull marketing opted in emails of people who ordered and we would filter out Gmail AOL anything that indicated it was a per personal email address. And we would email people who were ordering main menu with a work email address and ask them for a referral to the catering decision maker in exchange for Freedig in. And this was a great conversion tactic. It really, really worked. And then I ended up, here's the day the story I ended up meeting these guys at a catering conference. These young guys, they had this startup, they built this catering ordering platform and they wanted to pitch it to me. And I'm like, I'm happy with my catering order solution. Would you just indulge us and give us feedback on our pitch as like a cmo? Like, sure. So they start showing me this platform. They're out of Canada. They just have, like a couple of customers on this platform, like people who were previously taking orders on paper that they were able to convert into this tool. And then they gloss over this feature in the product where they're like, oh, yeah. And by the way, we've developed this AI automation tool that allows you to create CRM journeys based off of an RFM model of what's going on in the actual ordering platform. So I told them, I'm like, you guys should not be selling catering ordering platform. That's a really saturated market. It's high switching costs. It's going to be really hard for you to make progress on that. But your real gem in your product is that you figured out CRM for catering. And I could tell you as a marketer that's trying to figure out how to do it on my own, nobody else is doing it and they should be doing it. And I'm like, you know, hope you're not offended. I called your baby ugly, but that's my feedback for you. Have a nice day. Do with that information what you will. And they called me a week later and they're like, we thought about what you said. You were right. Can you be an advisor to us? And they ended up selling off the technology, the ordering platform technology to another company. And they're solely focused on this AI CRM solution specifically for catering. And that for me also just, like, accelerated my love of trying to figure out AI and how restaurant marketers can leverage that solution.
- [13:01]
Dave Gerhardt
So, yeah, because, I mean, all the stuff that you talked about, I was just thinking of, like, all the digging stuff was like, yeah, man, you had to pretty much do that before AI. Now you could run all these different queries and ask all these questions and come up with these different preferences.
- [13:14]
Jessica Serrano
Exactly. And what has surprised me the most is, is, and I'm curious if you or your audience relates to this is there's still quite a bit of hesitation from sales folks on what that means for their job. That's what I didn't. I was so excited to figure out this technology, and then I hit some opposition. And I think the real underlying objection there was, well, if this AI automated CRM solution is doing this for me, what does it mean for me as a sales rep? And it wasn't about. We didn't reduce the headcount of the sales team, but it was about having them focus on nurturing other parts of the journey of making sure. Like, did they have a good experience? Was it on time? Was it accurate? As opposed to sitting at their desk pulling email addresses?
- [14:01]
Dave Gerhardt
I mean, well, forget the salespeople. There's thousands of people that listen to this podcast that are in marketing, that are wondering, what role do we play? How does this impact our. Our jobs? I mean, my. My business partner and I, Dan, we've been, like, a lot of people right now. It's like, Claude, Claude, code, Claude, cowork, everything. We're having some serious conversations right now about, like, wait a second. These are all things that in the past would have taken, like, a lot of time or we would have had to do. This is really interesting. What does this mean? I don't have the definitive answer to this. I'll tell you how I'm feeling, Jessica. Like, in. In this moment, I feel like the AI can replace a lot of the work, but I think the skill. I try to share the prompts that I with my team because I'm like, I'm not like, now change it to black. Now make it blue. Make it a little bit bigger. Boom. You know, here it is. I'm like, the prompts that I'm writing and the way that I'm interacting with AI is like, I'm taking my 15 years of experience in marketing, and I'm like, okay, you're this. And I'm, like, trying to show it's a level of effort. So I almost feel like I still get to be like, I'm like the puppet master now. You know, Like, I still gotta have the taste, the vision, the ideas. But I don't have to basically now be like, well, I got the idea. Now I just gotta wait seven days for my developer to, like, deploy this to the website. I kind of see you nodding along. Do you kind of. You get what I'm saying?
- [15:19]
Jessica Serrano
Oh, I totally relate. When I was an associate brand manager at Taco Bell, I spent the majority of my job, I feel like writing concepts, so this might be unfamiliar. I don't know if your audience has a similar experience, but in B2C, traditional CPG, when you want to launch a Quesarito or whatever, right? You actually have to write, like, the
- [15:36]
Dave Gerhardt
nuggets, the Taco Bell nuggets. That's what I saw a commercial for.
- [15:40]
Jessica Serrano
Yes, that's the new thing. You know you have to write out these concepts. Right. It's basically AB testing. So you'd write all the different positioning statements and different price points and different naming conventions. And I learned how to do all of that by hand. It was a very painful process. And of course now, you know, 15 years later, like, I can do that with my eyes closed. And so now I don't have to, because I actually have an AI tool where I have trained it how to write product concepts.
- [16:11]
Dave Gerhardt
What are you using today?
- [16:12]
Jessica Serrano
Okay, so I, I must confess, I consider myself kind of a late adopter when it comes to technology. So I was a diehard ChatGPT user and I kept hearing everybody say, like, Claude is away. Claude is away. So the last couple of weeks, I wasn't ready to like, just fully jump into that. I started using both and I still was not convinced at first. So I was like, I'm still liking chat, but I think it's because, like, I've really invested a lot in chat understanding me and I hadn't put in that same work on. I will tell you, yesterday I had a huge breakthrough with Claude. I was like, holy, this is what people are talking about.
- [16:49]
Dave Gerhardt
What was the breakthrough? What did you do yesterday?
- [16:51]
Jessica Serrano
What I like about Claude, so chat, I think is we're really lockstep on my voice and, and copy and so, like, if I need to write a product concept, chat's got me. But Claude, what I really love about it is the ability to like, spin out a financial model for you or spin up thoughts in a deck. The ability to translate those ideas off platform really seamlessly. Pretty impressive. Yeah.
- [17:17]
Dave Gerhardt
I don't know if it's a new model. I like, work in tech, I guess probably on the. Compared to the average person, probably am an early adopter, but I'm not. The day you could figure out Claude code, like, did I figure that out? No, I'm not, I'm not that. And it is funny. I'm like taking notes and I'm laughing because this literally the past week, last Friday, every Friday, we have a team meeting and I was like, I need to present. I got to show what I did this week with Claude to the team because we've been on chat, GPT and Gemini, and this entire week, everything has changed. Our whole team is now, like, using Claude for so much of our workflows. And so I, I wonder if it's like everybody. My research on the Internet seems to be saying that it's this new model that really works. But I, I do believe everyone on this podcast and others has said that for marketing work, writing strategy type of stuff. Claude seems to just the water over there in that town, the way that, you know how they say, like, the New York bagels taste better, you know, because of the water. Something, just something about the way they make it over there, I think just lend itself better to marketing. But at the same time, I'm also like, the way that all of this is, like moving so fast. Like, do we even need to learn any of these things? Or is it all just gonna eventually become like one supermodel? And whether it's chatgpt or anthropic, like, aren't you just gonna be able to build the next Einstein Brothers website just through ChatGPT? Like, I would take that bet right now.
- [18:38]
Jessica Serrano
100%. I know. I spent my Saturday trying to figure out cloud code, and I didn't make as much progress as I would have hoped.
- [18:46]
Dave Gerhardt
And I'm like, hold on, we gotta, we gotta, we pause on this. There's a lot of parents that listen to this. And the vibe, what I've been joking is like, because I like to do some shit posts sometimes, right? And so I wrote my Neo one I guess was kind of in that area. But last week I wrote like, how I ignored my wife, I ignored my kids all weekend because dad was just in the other room, you know, working with Claude, and I made my webinar emails five times more efficient. But hey, at least my family, you know, hates me now. When did you actually do this in the life of a mom with twin 5 year olds? Did you tell me your actual weekend? I need to know, please.
- [19:15]
Jessica Serrano
Well, I had leverage because my husband traveled all last week for work. Anytime that happens, I'm always like, shout out to solo parents because, you know, doing it for a week was hard and some people do it all the time, so respect. So he said, you have the weekend to yourself because of my trip. So, like a door, you are one of us.
- [19:39]
Dave Gerhardt
One of us. This is so great. She had the weekend free and she spent it with Claude. Love that. Welcome in.
- [19:46]
Jessica Serrano
Yes. Yeah. Yeah, so. And I didn't make as much progress as I wanted to on it. But you know what? Point being, I agree with you that on the one hand, I'm like, I'm a very active spectator of folks who are more technically inclined to take these tools and run with it. I watch a lot of videos and listen to podcasts of people who are playing with things like what is it now? Molt Bot. And. And I think it's interesting because there's, you know, for the novice, like, there's a lot of security concerns, and so you got to be careful about how you're structuring all of these tools. And so seeing that OpenAI just hired the founder of Claudebot is interesting because I think that's the next thing is who can figure out these personal agents in a way that is more turnkey and safe for the average consumer. We'll see.
- [20:33]
Dave Gerhardt
And do you feel like something bubbled up? Was it just like you had seen so much Claude, that you're just like, man, when I get a free moment, I got to just learn this stuff. And that's what led to that weekend?
- [20:43]
Jessica Serrano
Yeah. And I do look for other people that spend their weekend building this stuff, and I attach myself to them. So there's a restaurant Martech vendor that their cio, he is obsessed and using it and completely transformed the way that they're developing their software. And it's like the number of roadmap updates that they're doing is just. You can see that AI has transformed their working method. And so I appreciate him is because he's gotten restaurant marketers together and he's been doing these AI hackathons. And I'm grateful because I think, like I said, a lot of us got into this business because we care about hospitality, but we're also realizing, like, we don't want to get left behind. We want to figure this stuff out. So there's power in getting together and going, how are you using this? And comparing notes and just experimenting with it. So a lot of it really was inspired by meeting with other people in my industry and sharing best practices of, like, use cases.
- [21:38]
Dave Gerhardt
Nice. That's a common trait among many highly successful people. And CMOs I've had the pleasure of interviewing is like, this curiosity for people listening. It's like, this is what it takes. It's like Jessica's, you know, already got the job and she's got a family and she's got life and. But she's like, I'm finding some time to learn this stuff. And I think that is what it takes. I also think there's a huge gap between. At least for me, when I watch. I'm watching the videos, I'm learning, but I have to do it myself until it. It doesn't really click until I actually do it myself and I actually use it. I think one of my biggest frustrations with the AI stuff right now is I do Think it's cool. A lot of it feels kind of fake and performative, though. It's like, I don't want to do it because I'm showing everyone how cool I am. And look at me using these tools too. I want to, like, do better work. I want to ship things faster, a hundred percent.
- [22:24]
Jessica Serrano
And if I could be honest with you, I mean, the real unlock is through having the integration. So, sure, if you're a founder and you are setting up your own cloud bot to automate processes that you own, that's one thing. But if you're in an organization that hasn't quite figured this out, a real magic, right? It's like putting the data into the system and setting and the integration.
- [22:45]
Dave Gerhardt
But you mentioned, like, security and stuff, and it's like, right, you run marketing at a. At a brand that has been around for 30 years. You cannot just suck in all of the company data and put it in this thing and just put it out into the world. There's a lot of risk there. Did you think about that in your world?
- [23:01]
Jessica Serrano
Yeah, 100%. And so part of it is building AI comfort and literacy through safe experimentation. And so in my world, it is partnering with AI first. Companies that can help us set these things up in a way that isn't exactly like Jessica playing with it on a Saturday. Right? So I play with it on a Saturday so that I understand the benefits. But then that's how I can become an advocate for more intentional integration. So one of the first tools that I started leveraging AI and is about market research. And a lot of my motivation was coming from smaller brands and realizing that AI, it can really be a great equalizer, because dig in. I didn't have a research budget. I did at Taco Bell, I did at Burger King. And so I found a company that basically created an LLM that allows me to drive consumers into my stores, have them try a product, and then do a natural language. Like, really? It's like chatting with ChatGPT. Like, you tried the new bagel. What did you think about it? And prior to that, you know, I would have had to do really expensive central location testing, higher market research firm, or like a really static NPS survey, where then afterwards I'm like, I wish I would have asked these other 10 questions, or I have no idea how to interpret a 4.3 out of 5. And bringing in this tool has completely allowed us to do rapid product testing in a way that our budgets would have never allowed. And it was hard for people to understand why we were bringing a tool like this in and what did it mean and is it going to go grok on us? And it is about like, just, can we try it once, you know, like just starting to like, help whet the appetite. And then once organizations see the benefit, we can continue to figure out more opportunities to leverage this technology. It's not going anywhere.
- [24:48]
Sponsor/Ad Voice
Hey, it's me, Dave. Our friends over at Customer I.O. are sponsors of today's episode. They're a really cool company that helps marketers turn first party data into engaging customer experiences across email, SMS and push. And they built their platform for marketers who actually care about the craft. Because marketing is a craft. It takes creativity, thought and taste. Right now everyone thinks they're magically a marketer because they have access to AI and the result is kind of painful. More robotic emails, more noise, more bl. AI isn't magic.
- [25:19]
Dave Gerhardt
It's not going to fix bad strategy
- [25:20]
Sponsor/Ad Voice
or write great copy for you magically. But the best teams also aren't ignoring it. They treat AI as infrastructure.
- [25:27]
Dave Gerhardt
When it's built the right way, it
- [25:28]
Sponsor/Ad Voice
actually makes marketing feel more human, not less. And that's what customer IO is doing. Their AI handles repetitive work like setup, orchestration and tasks that should be automated so that you can focus on what actually matters matters. The craft of marketing, the strategy, the creativity. This is how good marketers are using AI right now. Not to replace thinking, but to support it. If this landed with you at all, this idea about the craft of marketing, I want you to go and check out customer IO. It's customer IO exit 5. Go and check them out. Customer IO, exit 5.
- [26:01]
Dave Gerhardt
It's not going anywhere. And you almost do so much like have a need for high volume of creative ads, images and stuff. I've seen a lot of use cases with Claude and the Figma Connector. Like how can we take one campaign and generate 100? Can you just tell me about your life as the CMO of bagel brands? This company runs a bunch of different bagel bagel conglomerates. How do things work in your world? That's what I want to know. Is it just about like, did we sell more bagels? I got to figure there's brand versus direct response. What channels are using? I don't have like one question, but I'd love to like just tap into like the life of a, of a CMO right now.
- [26:40]
Jessica Serrano
Yeah, I'm about six months in, so still pretty early. But it is an interesting journey because we do have four brands. The one that is the largest and probably most Familiar to your audience is Einstein Brothers, which we have hundreds of throughout the US but we also have Noah's in California. Brugers is another big brand. And then we have Manhattan Bagels on the East Coast. So these are brick and mortar brands that have been around for 30 years. Where. Yes, at the most basic of basic KPIs, it's did we sell more bagels today than we did yesterday?
- [27:11]
Dave Gerhardt
Like, ultimately, if you were to zoom out and you end up staying at this company for years, whatever, the measure of that success is going to be like, did we make the cash register ring?
- [27:21]
Jessica Serrano
Yes. So our language would be same store sales. And that is a combination of transactions and checks. Did we get more people to come or did we get people to spend more money?
- [27:32]
Dave Gerhardt
So same store sales. So success is measured in that local market with that specific store.
- [27:38]
Jessica Serrano
Same store sales or comp sales basically means any restaurants that have been open more than. Call it 365 days. So inorganic, year over year growth.
- [27:48]
Dave Gerhardt
Yeah. Okay. All right, cool, man. I have so many questions. I don't even care. The listeners. Some people listen, they're like, this guy doesn't know anything. He asked the most basic questions.
- [27:55]
Jessica Serrano
Going on a bagel or come with us on the tour.
- [27:58]
Dave Gerhardt
All right, let's go. Let's see. Let's take. I used to work at a startup and every Tuesday morning we got Brugers. And I was like, the biggest. The big deal. Yeah, it was back in the day,
- [28:06]
Jessica Serrano
but I wanted to fill into that. Used to. Because that's. That's my job.
- [28:11]
Dave Gerhardt
Oh, well, this is what I meant to say to you, actually, I made a note on this. It is funny because one timeless thing that I got from you, and we're feeling this in our own business, I think because of tech and because of AI it is. So we always want to search for the next cool thing, the next big channel, the next viral TikTok video. But I love what you said about your last company, where on B2B we would just call that close lost. Right. It's like these people used to spend money with us. They didn't. The whole game is getting customers. Let's go find out why those people don't. And you. The level of things you can learn from that, that influence, how you do marketing is like. So I love bringing back to the simple lessons. Right?
- [28:46]
Jessica Serrano
Yes.
- [28:47]
Dave Gerhardt
So how do you get people to the individual. How do you do marketing at like the brand level that then drives people into the individual stores? There's a Bruggers bagels. Coolidge corner in Brookline, Massachusetts where I used to live. How do we move the needle on that store?
- [29:01]
Jessica Serrano
That's such a layered question, but high level. At the end of the day, the job is driving. We're building a brand over time and we're driving sales overnight. And so we're building out a marketing calendar that's doing both of those things. Right. So we have top of funnel awareness.
- [29:15]
Dave Gerhardt
Oh, I like that. That's a bar brand over time, sales overnight. And I'm asking this is. And I'll shut up in a second. But the reason why I'm asking this is because one of the things that comes up all the time in B2B in our world is like balancing like closing deals now and building a brand. And we have this concept that like those two things have to compete each other. But I like talking to consumer marketers because it's so obvious that they don't. And you talk about how those two things integrate. Okay, I'm not going to just interrupt you. Keep going.
- [29:42]
Jessica Serrano
We get into marketing because we're brand builders. And so really at the end of the day I do the sales overnight stuff so that I keep my job. But my real heart is also building a brand for the long term. So if I do the sales stuff overnight, they let me stay and then in my spare time I get to think about like, how do we actually build this for the next 30 years? And to your point about the life cycle, what's interesting about the restaurant space is historically it's been a mostly cash business for many, many decades. And I call those unknown diners. You don't know anything about them. They're faceless transactions. I can tell you what my average check is at the end of the day. I can tell you how many people came in. I can tell you what was on that ticket, but I can't tell you longitudinally. You know, it was Dave and he comes every Tuesday. And that has been the challenge for restaurant marketing for a long time until loyalty came around. And so that's the thing that I always want to remind people about loyalty is people get all distracted about loyalty and discounts and all the reason for loyalty is known diner data straight up. And so you're always trying to get as many people into your loyalty program because you're learning from who are your heaviest users, your infrequent users. All of those insights are informing how we're building the marketing calendar, but also informing our life cycle marketing and how we're approaching SMS and push and you know, to your Direct mail. So how do I get to sales in that Massachusetts location? Well, part of it is with loyalty. I'm able to glean insights about what's unique to people in that market and build campaigns that are both thinking about the overall brand, but also some local marketing, too. So there may be tactics where we're focusing on, like, hey, we have an opportunity to grow awareness in this market. Well, how do we get into the community? Should we be sponsoring 5Ks and you end every 5K with a bagel? So it's a balance of all of those different tactics, which I'm sure is not unique to B2C in that example.
- [31:41]
Dave Gerhardt
Like, do you have a team? Are you doing this all by yourself? Do you have a team that covers, like, these. These certain areas? You know, because you. You have hundreds of locations around. How do you actually go in? I get it, like, conceptually. But how do you actually go and do the work?
- [31:54]
Jessica Serrano
It's interesting because I've now had the benefit of working at a few different organizations, and they all do it differently, you know, so, like, when I was at Taco Bell, it was all national marketing. McDonald's. I never worked there, but I can tell you, like, local store marketing is a huge part of their business. Chick Fil, A local store marketing. Raisin Cane's local store marketing. So there's brands that have decided, I'll focus on building a brand nationally, or I do it kind of DMA by dma. There's no right answer. You kind of have to figure out what's right. But it is hard to do both really well. And I think that's the challenge I'm facing here is I really focused on local store marketing at Dig in because it was 30 to 40 locations, so it was easier to do. It's how Chipotle scaled their business, really was store by store. And now I'm in an organization. To your point, we're nearing a thousand locations, and I don't have a local store marketing team. And so what I'm doing is really focusing on the big rocks, we'll call it, like, the things that are going to move the needle nationally. But then identifying, like, what are some key areas where if we just drill down, like, a lot of it is just 80, 20, what are the five bottom performing markets? And, like, how could I take a toolbox and bring that down to the local?
- [33:03]
Dave Gerhardt
Right, yeah, that's so true. That's so true. Like, the. Sometimes it's like things are working well, the marketing almost. You just need to get out of the way and just have, like, a sign outside the door that says, like, you know, bagels here, like, now open. You know, you don't. Not every place requires your same amount of effort. I think about the same thing in my business right now. I could make a list of a hundred things, but they're not all equally as important. That's pretty good. That's going really well over there. Like, don't touch that.
- [33:26]
Sponsor/Ad Voice
It's.
- [33:27]
Dave Gerhardt
It's these things.
- [33:27]
Jessica Serrano
Yeah.
- [33:28]
Dave Gerhardt
What's the makeup of your team today?
- [33:31]
Jessica Serrano
So I have a creative services team. So we do some of our creative in house. And to your point, I think, you know, we're hitting an inflection point where we want more creative, more versioning, and we're trying to figure out what tools can support that team. And then I have culinary and menu. So we have a head chef. Right. And so we're constantly building out a pipeline of product innovation in our world. That is bagels and coffee.
- [33:55]
Dave Gerhardt
Is the head chef, like a marketing function that reports into marketing?
- [33:59]
Jessica Serrano
Yeah.
- [34:00]
Dave Gerhardt
Wow, Dan, we need that in our world. Let's have all the product organization report into marketing. That's what I like.
- [34:08]
Jessica Serrano
So, yeah, he gets to dream up all the fun stuff. And then we have a marketing team that supports him from research and guest validation. We'll throw things into a test and see how it performs and scale from there. Loyalty, lifecycle, marketing, social. I feel like those are kind of the primary functions within my team. Yeah.
- [34:29]
Dave Gerhardt
Do you think about splitting the work? Like, social would be a good example of that. There's like, the micro level of social, which is like, we're running targeted ads to people in those certain geos around those stores. But then there's like, the macro brand level. We're creating fun, compelling, engaging content at the brand level. Does each team, like, do you split those? That type of thinking?
- [34:50]
Jessica Serrano
I wish I had the resources to do that, but I don't.
- [34:54]
Dave Gerhardt
Reality.
- [34:55]
Jessica Serrano
That's the reality. Right. And so it's about getting clever in terms of, like, how can we tap into external partners to help us to do those things best. It's hard to do all of those things well internally. And so really, part of joining this organization has been like, building out an ecosystem of partners that we can kind of plug in and scale with us as needed.
- [35:16]
Dave Gerhardt
One thought that I want to see if I could validate whether you just get your opinion. You worked at. You know, you've held marketing leadership roles across a bunch of different brands in restaurant marketing. I've been saying this thing lately that Like, I think that everything in marketing does work or has worked or someone has an example for every. Because everyone right now is like, everything is dead. But then everyone's like, no, outbound does work for us. Email does work. ABM works. My view on marketing is like, that every company has different ingredients. And so you just saying, like, I wish I had those resources. I love guardrails in marketing. Like, so, like, yeah, no, we can't do that. I don't like when you could do a thousand things. I like being told like, nope, actually we don't have the budget. We actually can attract A plus talent right now. We kind of have to build a team of maybe undrafted free agents or like C players that we're going to train into a players. Have you seen that across their companies where like, every brand is different, the founders different, the market is different. The fun job in marketing is figuring out, like, which recipe can I make with these ingredients?
- [36:13]
Jessica Serrano
Oh, my gosh. Yeah. I think probably one of my earliest mistakes is thinking that you can just take a playbook from one company and apply it to the next. And what I've had to learn.
- [36:23]
Dave Gerhardt
What was the example there? What did you learn?
- [36:25]
Jessica Serrano
I went from Taco Bell to Burger King and Taco Bell. I think I was just naive and I'm like, taco Bell is a fantastic place to work. So guest obsessed. Excellent processes and frameworks. And so I joined Burger King. Was really brought there to bring some of that thinking to Burger King. But you don't just like, say, hey, here's how we did it elsewhere. And all of a sudden everybody just agrees and starts working that way. And so I've hit a lot of roadblocks in terms of, like, if the team has not grown up in that culture, can they apply those learnings? So that was a journey of like, do we have the right people in the right seats? If this is truly like, where we want to take this brand and other things that were different about those businesses is that Taco Bell is built off of LTOs, to your point, like nuggets, right? Like every six weeks you're launching something. So that's a whole different muscle in terms of your rapid iteration, failing fast. Like, it's cultural.
- [37:19]
Dave Gerhardt
So that's embedded. That is the brand. That's a part of the brand. That is how they operate.
- [37:23]
Jessica Serrano
It is in their DNA. Right? And then I joined an organization that. And I realized, oh, actually we need to do the exact opposite here, which is like, we actually just need to sell the whopp. We need to focus on the core, there was a core equities that had been forgotten about because we were getting distracted with other ltos. But Taco Bell is the interesting choice. People choose it because they want a departure from burgers and fries. And so people expect that brand to be bringing like what's the fun way that they're using those same five ingredients differently? And what actually the Whopper was built on was for many years the Whopper was like the number one burger in America. For all I know it could still be. And so it was about like actually we just need to remind people that they love that. So you may have heard the jingle that was like some of the work that came out of that insight in recent years. So it took me a while to realize like you don't just take what worked elsewhere. You got to take a beat and figure out is that right for the brand, the consumer and even just the culture of how people there work, the DNA of the organization?
- [38:28]
Dave Gerhardt
Yeah. My experience as a consumer, I've always wanted to ask someone like you this, do you own like the in store experience? Because here's an example, right? I see an ad for Chipotle and my daughter was, she's eight and she was just commenting this. We were watching the super bowl and she's like, dad, that's not what Chipotle looks like in real life. You know, like the way the food looks on the commercial. And you could probably say this about, about any brand. There are some places that do a great job. My friends and I growing up, we used to play basketball, go work out and we go to this one, one Subway. And the one Subway went to was amazing. That Subway was better than the other subway because I don't know, maybe their model is franchise owned and the person who owned that like it was better. But I go to a random Chipotle here in Vermont and it like sucks and the food sucks and it kind of stinks in there and it's messy. That impacts the whole brand reputation. Do you own that in some way? And how do you control that? And doesn't that make you un. Like the markers that listen to this show? We don't have to deal with that. We don't have to actually deal with people walking into our store and like getting a plate of slop.
- [39:26]
Jessica Serrano
Like, right, I don't own it. I have an operations team that owns it. And so we work really closely together. But the great thing is there are lots of tools for us to have really constructive conversations around that experience. One being Google reviews.
- [39:41]
Dave Gerhardt
It's amazing source of truth.
- [39:43]
Jessica Serrano
It is. And so if you've ever left a review, I guarantee you people are in a room reading those reviews, talking about it, figuring out how we're going to do something differently. And so at scale you start to see themes. Right. It's just like any other data point. What are your average 5 star reviews or what are your average reviews? How's that trending? Leveraging AI to extract themes and using that to partner with ops to say we will never deliver an experience from a marketing standpoint that exceeds the in store experience. So we always want to make sure that we're not driving people into a store that can't live up to that experience. So we work very closely together to try and make sure that we are creating a seamless, consistent experience. Every single location. And there are a lot of variables to your point. There's franchise versus company owned. Maybe the GM quit, maybe three people didn't show up today, the truck didn't show up with the bagel. Whatever the case may be with the dough. So anyways, yes.
- [40:41]
Dave Gerhardt
Yeah, grass is always greener. Like you know, we just, most of the people are listening. We're dealing with software. You know, it's like you got a lot of people. There's a lot more people. Challenges in your, in your industry. Right.
- [40:52]
Jessica Serrano
Just different challenges.
- [40:54]
Dave Gerhardt
What else before we wrap? Anything that I should have asked you or you want to like riff on before we sign off. And I'm not meaning to rush you off, but I just, I found this is often a helpful question for someone that I didn't know before. Like, what's something I should have talked to you about?
- [41:08]
Jessica Serrano
Well, I'm curious what your relationship is with bagels. Like, what's your order? I'm going to take an advantage for like a focus group.
- [41:17]
Dave Gerhardt
All right, I got you. This is great. This is exciting because, you know, we need more. We need more personality, personal driven content. So my. There is a fantastic bagel place here in Vermont. Low in the town that I live. Locally owned business, Burlington Bagel Bakery, the Triple B. I think there's two locations here and what they do well. So first I'll tell you everything because I actually love this restaurant. I use it as an example. So many places have gone to shit post Covid I personally, I think. And that's, that's nobody's fault. It's impossible. Like everything's expensive. It must be, you know, talent, retention, all that is like a whole world that I can't imagine. So I'm not, I'm not like I say this with no judgment, it's just like I feel like the quality of a lot of these quick serve, what do you call them? Fast, like fast casual.
- [42:02]
Jessica Serrano
Like QSRs. Yeah, yeah.
- [42:04]
Dave Gerhardt
I feel like the quality of them has gone down this place though. Even if there's a line out the door, you're gonna get your food in 10 minutes. They got like a bunch of college, younger, healthy looking, smiling college people. Like it matters a lot when you step in the door. Hey, are you being helped right now? Like, I feel like there's a. The customer service aspect of this is great. And my go to order is. And this is also at Bruger's, my bagel. Is that the cheddar? I like the cheddar jalapeno bagel. I'll get a sausage, egg and cheese on a cheddar jalapeno bagel or maybe a cheddar dill. They have a triple B, which is what they call it. Comes with an egg and a hash brown. That's always. I'm never. My wife is more of the like, if you go to the bagel place, get me everything with veggie cream cheese. That's a snack to me. I want a meal, I want the, I need a sausage, egg and cheese, bacon, egg and cheese, that type of thing. And then I'm usually going to get a coffee on the way out and, and that's a great way to start today. Big, big bagel fan.
- [42:58]
Jessica Serrano
Okay. Well, if you ever chat with their team, I encourage you to ask them a little bit about their tech challenges because it's an interesting space, especially as a small operator. How much they have to leverage these martech tools when they really just want to be making bagels would be my guest. So.
- [43:15]
Dave Gerhardt
I know, but I think about this, this is my sick mind as a marketer and just operator. Like I do think about a lot of the small businesses, particularly in the restaurant world, just areas where technology could help. But it's also this, it must feel like this never ending thing because it's like, yeah, you got to be up at three in the morning making the bagels. Like you don't have time to like, yeah, sure, marketing guy like Claude would be great but like I gotta make sure we have enough cheddar jalapeno bagels today or the bald guy podcast host is gonna leave me a bad Google review. Like, yeah, that's the reality of it.
- [43:46]
Jessica Serrano
I know, but think about like, who knows how they're doing their inventory of deciding like how many Cheddar jalapeno bagels, they're gonna make for the day. Are they doing that off of the back of some guy who's been there 30 years and just intuitively knows we sell more of them on Saturdays than we do on Mondays? Like we could have a whole nother 30 minutes just thinking.
- [44:02]
Dave Gerhardt
But that. Right. So I was saying, like, that could be a simple data driven. Like, can I just get like a CSV of the bagel orders from today and could we just look at that week over week? Are we even doing that? We don't know.
- [44:11]
Jessica Serrano
Yeah.
- [44:12]
Dave Gerhardt
If you could wave a magic wand and solve. Or if I was the marketing genie, you had to rub my bald head and I could give you one marketing wish, what would it be?
- [44:19]
Jessica Serrano
Oh, my goodness.
- [44:21]
Dave Gerhardt
In your role right now as a cmo.
- [44:24]
Jessica Serrano
Yeah. I mean, really, integrations sounds so technical, but I'm surprised how many things could be operated more seamlessly if we could just figure out how to get different systems to talk to each other.
- [44:39]
Dave Gerhardt
Isn't that kind of what they're pitching with AI and MCPs and all this stuff is. Could we have all of this stuff talk to each other and then we can run our business on top of that layer?
- [44:47]
Jessica Serrano
Yeah, I feel like it's going to happen, but I'm anxious for it.
- [44:51]
Dave Gerhardt
Oh, by the way, I didn't ask you the one question on your LinkedIn. You're sitting interviewing Gary Vee in like a Ferris wheel or something like that, or is that a. Like a cabana? What's the story there?
- [45:02]
Jessica Serrano
It was a yacht that was at.
- [45:03]
Dave Gerhardt
Oh, excuse me, sorry. How dare I suggest not my yacht?
- [45:08]
Jessica Serrano
It was the Vayner yacht.
- [45:10]
Dave Gerhardt
The Vayner yacht, yeah.
- [45:11]
Jessica Serrano
No, that was at Possible, this conference that happens every year in April in Miami. And I was living in Miami at the time, so it was actually not far from my home. But yeah, I had an opportunity to sit down and talk to Gary Vee, which was fun because I think he has some good provocations around the role of social. You know, I think the biggest thing that he challenges me to think is if it has not gone viral organically, you should not be putting paid behind it.
- [45:37]
Dave Gerhardt
Some people don't like Gary because of the way he speaks, but if you listen to the things he says, that is so true, especially in this era, like, do you know what they would have killed, like the era of like the 1950, 1960s Mad Men. Like to be able to have everything organic first and then be able to like, have you seen his example of The Miralax video that they did.
- [45:56]
Jessica Serrano
I haven't.
- [45:57]
Dave Gerhardt
Okay. I don't know why you would have. Sorry. You're like, yeah, I love that ad. That's my favorite ad. But he just had people in his office make it organic. Like it was like roommates and like there's a whiteboard on the fridge and it was like poop chart. And like Dave had pooped three more times than everyone else. And the secret was like Miralax. But he was like, that ad took someone on my team. Like, we made that video organically in like one minute, posted it organically, it popped off. And so then the next step there was like, yeah, let's run this ad paid. We do this now with LinkedIn for us is huge because of B2B and targeting. And so basically we do everything through my personal page. Like I'll write a post and then we will then turn that post into paid because of the thought leadership ad which just runs that. So I love that.
- [46:38]
Jessica Serrano
Yeah, I mean, that's a wish is. I wish that more social marketers had the courage to just throw stuff out there. I think there's such an instinct towards curation, an old instinct. And it's like, just throw it out there, do bad stuff. You're not going to know what's good unless you're at a high level of volume. So, you know, easier said than done.
- [46:58]
Dave Gerhardt
But is your team all remote?
- [47:00]
Jessica Serrano
No, we are based in Denver.
- [47:02]
Dave Gerhardt
Oh, you're in Denver. Do you live in Denver? You live in Denver?
- [47:04]
Jessica Serrano
I moved to Denver for this job, yeah.
- [47:06]
Dave Gerhardt
Wow.
- [47:07]
Jessica Serrano
I think with restaurants there's, you know, we figured out how to work remotely for many years, but at some point when you're eating food, you gotta like be in a place where you can get in the kitchen together. So.
- [47:16]
Dave Gerhardt
Well, that's, I was gonna say, like, that's the most amazing ingredient in content, isn't it? Like, yeah.
- [47:20]
Jessica Serrano
Honestly, the best content is in the bakeries, it's in the restaurants. It's like, let's not sell you food style, food on a plate. Come with me at 4am to go and bake these bagels. You know, so still early on that journey of evolving that content, but had a lot of success with that at Digin and think that's where content is going. Right. People want to see the behind the scenes, they don't want to see the overly manufactured stuff.
- [47:43]
Dave Gerhardt
I think that's going to be even more true now with AI was ranting on this this morning. Like, there's this, you know, the whole like dead Internet theory.
- [47:51]
Jessica Serrano
Yes.
- [47:52]
Dave Gerhardt
If all the comments are AI. If all the images are fake, if all the images are stock photos, like, who do you believe?
- [47:59]
Jessica Serrano
I know. We come full circle to the Neo post. Yeah.
- [48:04]
Dave Gerhardt
Oh, my God, that's amazing. Yeah.
- [48:07]
Jessica Serrano
How do you feel about answering machines in today's day and age? So real. It's so true. Thank you for sharing your thoughts.
- [48:15]
Dave Gerhardt
I'm so sick of love songs. Honestly, I don't need them anymore. I'm happily in love. I'm married. I got kids. I don't need Neo anymore. That was a important part, you know,
- [48:24]
Jessica Serrano
Cue the bad bunny, Q. Yeah.
- [48:26]
Dave Gerhardt
Cue some bad bunny. Yeah, that's right. That's where we started on the real. Talk about answering machines, though, my kids, we got a landline. The landline is back. The landline is back. I am long landline. They keep asking me to use my phone to FaceTime a friend. I'm like, look, I'm not. Respectfully, I'm not texting that guy to ask if you could FaceTime this dad through my phone. And so, like, the landline has a purpose. You need to call someone's house.
- [48:50]
Jessica Serrano
Yeah.
- [48:51]
Dave Gerhardt
The feeling of calling someone's house and being like, oh, my God, the dad. Oh, please don't. Please don't.
- [48:56]
Jessica Serrano
Exactly. Everybody needs to know the fear, especially talk about B2B sales. You need to know the fear of having to talk to my dad to get to me. I think that's a long, long.
- [49:06]
Dave Gerhardt
I'm all set with that if I never have to experience that again. Exactly. You're like, please don't answer. Please don't answer.
- [49:11]
Jessica Serrano
Please.
- [49:11]
Dave Gerhardt
I would just hang up. I would hang up if you. I would. Please, please let her answer. Please let her hang up.
- [49:18]
Jessica Serrano
I had a terrifying dad, so I feel like not enough people know that feeling.
- [49:24]
Dave Gerhardt
I. Yes. I could only wish to be that, because I'm sure it was very helpful. Jessica Serrano. You rock. Find her on LinkedIn. We'll. I want you to send her lots of notes, and I want her to be like, man, you actually do have people that listen to your podcast.
- [49:36]
Jessica Serrano
Send me lyrics.
- [49:37]
Dave Gerhardt
Find her.
- [49:37]
Jessica Serrano
Yes.
- [49:38]
Dave Gerhardt
Send her lyrics. Send her notes. Bad bunny Neo. You can, you know, share stories about intimidating fathers. Whatever you want. Great to have you on the pod. I hope I'll see see you again at some point. Thanks for coming and doing this. Yeah, thank you.
- [49:48]
Jessica Serrano
Thanks for having me. Bye.
- [49:54]
Dave Gerhardt
Hey, thanks for listening to this podcast. If you like this episode. You know what? I'm not even going to ask you to subscribe and Leave a review because I don't really care about that. I have something better for you. So we've built the number one private community for B2B marketers at exit 5 and you can go and check that out. Instead of leaving a rating or review, go check it out right now on our website exit5.com our mission at Exit 5 is to help you grow your career in B2B marketing. And there's no better place to do that than with us at exit 5. There's nearly 5,000 members now in our community. People are in there posting every day asking questions about things like marketing, planning ideas, inspiration, asking questions and getting feedback from your peers. Building your own network of marketers who doing the same thing you are so you can have a peer group or maybe just venting about your boss when you need to get in there and get something off your chest. It's 100% free to join for seven days so you can go and check it out risk free and then there's a small annual fee to pay if you want to become a member for the year. Go check it out. Learn more exit5.com and I will see you over there in the community. Foreign.
- [51:07]
Sponsor/Ad Voice
Is brought to you by Compound Growth Marketing. They're a full funnel demand generation agency that I've actually personally hired twice. That's right.
- [51:14]
Dave Gerhardt
Before I was a thought leader, I
- [51:16]
Sponsor/Ad Voice
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